Research suggests that by the age of five, children have extensive causal knowledge, in the
form of intuitive theories. The crucial question for developmental cognitive science is how …

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children
are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word …

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and
activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of …

Researchers, educators, and parents have long believed that children learn cause and
effect relationships through exploratory play. However, previous research suggests that …

Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning
underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our …

Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of the human imagination. Recently, researchers
have argued that children do not display genuine counterfactual reasoning until they can …

The present study investigated the development of possibility‐judgment strategies between
the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a …

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with
domain-general statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these …

Our folk psychology includes intuitions about free will; we believe that our intentional acts
are choices and that, when such actions are not constrained, we are free to act otherwise. In …

Young children have difficulty in distinguishing events that violate physical laws (impossible
events) from those that violate mere physical regularities (improbable events). They judge …